On Recursive Modification in Child L1 French

Yves Roberge,Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux,Anna Frolova

doi:10.3390/languages3010006

Yves Roberge, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3010006

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Abstract

This paper investigates nominal recursive modification (RM) in the L1 acquisition of French. Although recursion is considered the fundamental property of human languages, recursive self-embedding is found to be difficult for children in a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these challenges, the acquisition of RM proves to be resilient; acquirable even under severely degraded input conditions. From a minimalist perspective on the operations of narrow syntax, recursive embedding is essentially the application of a sequence of Merge operations (Chomsky 1995; Trotzke and Zwart 2014); therefore, given the universality of Merge, we do not expect to find cross-linguistic differences in how difficult recursion is. But if the challenging nature of recursion stems from factors which might differ from language to language, we expect different outcomes cross-linguistically. We compare new data from French to existing English data (Pérez-Leroux et al. 2012) in order to examine to what extent language-specific properties of RM structures determine the acquisition path. While children’s production differs significantly from their adult’s counterparts, we find no differences between French-speaking and English-speaking children. Our findings suggest that the challenging nature of recursion does not stem from the grammar itself and that what shapes the acquisition path is the interaction between universal properties of language and considerations not specific to language, namely computational efficiency.

Highlights

IntroductionIn child English, recursive possessive and Prepositional Phrase (PP) structures are rare in production, and difficult to understand (Limbach and Adone 2010; Roeper 2011; Pérez-Leroux et al 2012)
Recursion as an abstract property is considered a fundamental feature of human languages, recursive self-embedding, as in (1), has been shown to be difficult for children in a variety of languages and constructions
Recursive structures are the result of repeated applications of Merge operations and it follows that structures built through similar derivational steps should all be complex

Summary

Introduction

In child English, recursive possessive and Prepositional Phrase (PP) structures are rare in production, and difficult to understand (Limbach and Adone 2010; Roeper 2011; Pérez-Leroux et al 2012). Despite these challenges, the acquisition of recursive modification (RM) proves to be resilient, and acquirable even under severely degraded input conditions, such as in deaf home signers (Goldin-Meadow 1982) and bilinguals (Pérez-Leroux et al 2017). We follow the general approach outlined in Bejar et al (forthcoming) according to which “because recursive iterations of Merge can result in different varieties of recursively embedded output structures, some structural elaborations [may] turn out to be more complex than others.”

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